Project 2: Parallel Implementation

CS 441 Project, Dr. Lawlor

A substantial chunk of your course grade comes from the two semester projects.  Project 1 was more research-oriented.  Project 2 is more applied and implementation-oriented.  From the syllabus:   

PROJ2: a software development or hardware performance analysis project, due in December.


Here's what's left of the semester, before the midterm on December 18:
      November    
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
4 5 6 7 8 9 10
11 12 13 14 15 16 17
18 19 20 21 22 23 24 <- code working (thanksgiving)
25 26 27 28 29 30 1

December
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
2 3 4 5 6 7 8 <- presentations start
9 10 11 12 13 14 15
16 17 18 19 20 21 <- final code & writeup (finals week)
Please have your project 2 topic picked out and some simple project-related code working by Tuesday, November 20.

We'll have some very short (literally 7 minutes total per person) in-class presentations on Thursday, December 6 and Tuesday, December 11.  PowerPoint is NOT required, but you MUST have a clear idea of what you will present AND some sort of examples/illustrations/code/graphs.  I'm most interested in hearing:
Topics presented in class will appear on the final, so do ask questions if the presenter stops making sense!

The final code and short writeup are due Tuesday, December 18.  The writeup, called README (plain text or HTML), is basically just a one-page-or-less summary of what you did, what's working, and what you learned.  Be sure to give proper credit to your sources of code and documentation!

Possible Project 2 Topics

Or choose your own topic!  Topics should all be implementation work of the form "Write your own X" rather than research work of the form "Learn what people have done about X".
In all cases, part of the project is benchmarking--be sure to measure (and improve!) the performance of your implementation.